For all that any movie even vaguely about contagion and isolation will have special resonance in the Coronavirus era, I’ll spare you the topical commentary on The Beach House. This isn’t a new entry to the canon of outbreak horror. What The Beach House aims for instead is to be a Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) for the climate crisis, as four unsuspecting vacationers face an extinction event, complete with an homage of radio updates. Director Jeffrey A. Brown serves up a beautiful apocalypse, but a tonally and structurally imbalanced story.
Check out the trailer for The Beach House:
The Beach House begins in the territory of the social situation thriller, one of those movies where the quotidian awkwardness of an uncomfortable social encounter builds in dread and explodes into terror when the twist is finally revealed. Angsty dropout Randall (Noah Le Gros) takes girlfriend Emily (Liana Liberato), an aspiring astrobiologist, to his dad’s beach house, but family friends Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel) are already there. Tension settles in. Mitch and Jane’s story about why they’re staying at the beach house never feels quite right. The generation gap between the fresh-faced young couple and the older, wearier Mitch and Jane is ever apparent. When Randall introduces drugs into the mix, we seem poised for an escalation.
Vacation dinner gets weird (but not weird enough)
Successful social situation thrillers draw their dread out for as long as possible, and so The Beach House is front-loaded with lengthy scenes of the characters chatting. There is little of substance here, except for Emily’s rhapsodies on the fragility of human life and her fascination with astrobiology and the world of the deep sea, which helpfully foreshadow the film’s themes. As Emily, Liana Liberato turns in the strongest performance, withdrawn and dreamy until circumstances force her to be painfully in the present. Emily is also the best drawn, most competent, and, simply, the most relevant of the bunch. Indeed, when the other shoe finally drops, it has nothing to do with any of the interpersonal tension, only with Emily’s scientific interests. Herein lies the problem; The Beach House feels like two different movies stitched together – a thin character study that never comes to a satisfying point, and an intriguing apocalypse horror that isn’t given time to breathe.
Given my earlier comparison, perhaps I should cut the movie some slack. Night of the Living Dead was no profound character study either. But Romero’s film has a strong sense of economy in its favor. The character drama revolves around the threat of the encroaching zombies, themselves an effectively simple and ghoulish concept. In The Beach House, the character drama is quickly rendered all but irrelevant, and the threat is poorly defined. Characters face danger from at least three different directions, which are never knit neatly together into one overarching horror. Perhaps this is meant to be evocative of the multipronged threat of climate disaster. High-concept horror can certainly be effective. But packing such a density of terrors into the shorter of the film’s two halves means they all get tangled together, with none of the patience of the film’s more conceptual first half.
Jane sees the beach in a new light
It’s as a stylist that Brown and The Beach House really shine. The sober, realist style, interspersed with atmospheric flourishes like a close-up of a glass of bubbly and menacing long shots of the ocean, renders the body horror all the more palpable and the moments of cosmic horror all the more compelling. Brown makes good use of his ocean setting, with beautiful shots of the sea and shore made strange by bioluminescence. The beach is a better character than any of the actual characters. When the film goes for the weird or the atmospheric, it’s lovely to look at. That it manages these surreal scenes and still feels visually grounded in realism is impressive. And the sound design is a treat, a crunchy, hissing score that promises great terror beneath the surface. I’m all for a horror movie that’s pretty and substance-light, and this one delivers on the pretty. But The Beach House’s chatty front-matter and philosophizing promises substance that never arrives.
Does the beach make you feel small?
When I say that The Beach House is an entry in climate horror, I mean that it has eco-horror inclinations, a sort of anti-Anthropocene flick. The landscape in The Beach House is not a passive object of the characters’ enjoyment or a backdrop to their drama but an active menace with an apathetic-at-best relationship to the human characters. The film’s memorable final moment, which I won’t spoil, is as good a calling card as any for this kind of eco-horror, human reduced to little more than ballast. Such a film should be a lot less interested in the human than it tries to be. The Beach House nails atmosphere but wants to be one of those horror films that is also an arthouse drama. It shouldn’t be. The Beach House is at its best when its characters are confronted with threats as far from the human as it gets. It’s worth seeing for a little taste of what climate horror can be, if you don’t mind sitting through a heavy helping of what it can’t.
You can watch The Beach House on Shudder on July 9.
Related: Check out our article by Christy Tidwell on Crawl and the myth of human superiority -and an article by Dawn Keetley on the nature of ecohorror.
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